Category: Scholarship

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"98 Blog Tips for a Lazy Sunday"

Speaking of making money and blogging: From Problogger comes “98 Blog Tips for a Lazy Sunday,” and also the project/page/entry “31 Days to Building a Better Blog.” The intention with these tips has a lot to do with profit, but they also tend to be good ideas for good blog writing in general. I could see these things being very good tips for the blog part of Writing for the World Wide Web.

And again I wonder: what is the relationship between writerly/writing motivations and profit?

I also have to wonder a bit about sites like Problogger. Are sites that offer tips on how you too can become a professional blogger akin to infomercials or classrooms? Or both?

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Boing Boing changes, and money and blogging

I noticed this morning that there have been some changes at what is currently the most popular blog out there right now (I think, at least according to technorati– it’s one of my favorite reads at least), Boing Boing. The changes are captured in this post, “Welcome to the new Boing Boing!,” from Mark Frauenfelder. I’m not so interested in the new look (though it’s nice) or the spin-off bb gadgets blog (though I like gadgets, too). I am interested though in the change in their policy about comments:

We’re also happy to be reintroducing comments to Boing Boing, a feature we reluctantly dropped a couple of years ago. At that time, we lacked the resources to manage the comments, and felt that a lousy comment system was worse than no system at all, so we pulled the plug. We’ve never felt good about it, though, because our readers’ comments added a great deal of value to the blog. To correct this, we hired a terrific community manager to oversee the conversations: Teresa Nielsen Hayden. At her own blog, Making Light, Teresa has proven herself to be a wonderfully wise and talented tender of online conversations. Teresa worked closely with our designers to develop a commenting system that supports the Boing Boing community while preventing noise from drowning out the signal. “We want this new community system to make Boing Boing even more fun and informative,” says Teresa. Under her supervision, we’re sure it will be.

And then the other thing I find interesting is the number of people that Frauenfelder thanks for “helping make it all happen.” I don’t really know how many of these folks actually make a living at Boing Boing (after all, I think all of the main writers here have other jobs of various sorts), but there is a lot of advertising on the site, and, given Boing Boing’s popularity, I would assume that putting an ad on the site isn’t cheap. They’ve got to be making money hand over fist.

Now, I’m not against writers making money, and I certainly have no problem with the success that the Boing Boing folks have had. Good for them. But I do wonder about the extent to which sites like Boing Boing (or others out there that either are profitable or that aspire to be profitable) are still characteristically “blogs.” Back in the day, Rebecca Blood wrote The Weblog Handbook that the weblog is of course written by an individual and is of course not done for money. (I’m paraphrasing here, but I’m pretty sure that’s in her book some place.) I’m sure she’s changed her mind about these things in at least some ways since blogging has obviously changed in the last 10 years.

Still, it raises a good question especially in terms of my project: to what extent is blogging still an empowering “writerly” activity when it crosses over into money making? If the exigence for the rhetorical act becomes primarily a pay check, is it still– what word should I use here?– authentic? I dunno. I always resist criticism of novelist who make a lot of money, but I guess I’m still a little more resistant to the big bucks bloggers.

Regardless, I think I’d like to interview these Boing Boing folks for the BAWS project.

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Blog communities, rules, lessons, and BAWS

I’ve had a particularly unproductive (blogs as writerly spaces project-wise) couple of weeks. This week, much of my lack of productivity has to do with much welcomed family fun, but that’s a whole different issue I’ll post about soon on my unofficial blog. But last week, I was obsessing over the conversation on EMUTalk.org that started to turn kind of ugly. The short version is that when the EMU email system crashed for a week, people who use this system were pissed off, and the ICT people weighed in. Some where helpful, some could not really understand what the big deal was, and some were just, um, jerks.

I guess I did get some useful BAWS oriented lessons out of the whole thing though. This outburst was really just one of several over the last 10 months of the site, and it prompted me to do something that I should have done a long time ago: write up some rules. These rules were largely based on other rules that I found at other places, and particularly useful was the Blogging Wikia project (specifically, the Code of Conduct project on this site), along with the codes of conduct from a few other community-oriented blogs.
Continue reading “Blog communities, rules, lessons, and BAWS”

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What it might look like if people who hate social networking got together

Via TechCrunch comes “NOSO,” or “No Social,” a relief from the social networking experience. The video on the site explains the details, but basically, the NOSO is a way to organize a group of people who agree to make no connections and to disengage from their various Web 2.0 networks for a set period of time.

Obviously, it’s a bit of a goofy art project. Still, as someone who has found himself rather distracted from his scholarship by online events this last week, a little NOSO-ing might not be a bad idea.

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Man with a Movie Camera project

Via Cheryl Ball’s post on Tech-Rhet comes this project, a remake of Man With a Movie Camera. Basically, the project asks for folks to re-shoot scenes from this movie, which is a 1929 experimental/documentary film I had never heard of before (which perhaps proves the fact that I am not really a film scholar). Conveniently, the original is available at the project site in the form of a google video.

I’m not sure if there’s any way I could use this in my teaching, and I’m not completely sure I should even if I could. This seems to me to fall into that fuzzy space of not exactly writing, even though writing includes a lot of different things. I could go on and on about this, and I did write an article about these questions in 2004. I’m not sure I still agree with the arguments I made back then, but at the same time, this probably isn’t something that would fit well in anything I teach.

On the other hand, this might be a fun thing to try on my own. I’ve got my FlipVideo camera (not to mention access to the English department’s super-nice camera), and it might make for a fun little side-project during sabbatical lite. Of course, I’m getting more and more of these side projects….

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Shameless self-promotion department: Where Do I List This on My CV 2.0

The new Kairos is out and it features a revised version of an essay/article I wrote originally for CCC Online in 2002, “Where Do I List This on My CV?”Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites. The new version here– version 2.0– includes the old version and also some updates.

I had a fine time working with the fine folks at Kairos, especially Mike Edwards and Cheryl Ball. Cheryl asked me a while back if I was interested in this process of revamping the article, and Mike did a great job of leading me through the process. I’m thankful for their advice and help, and I hope that folks out there find this second version interesting and helpful and all the rest.

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"Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?"

Via jill/txt I came across this article in First Monday, “Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?” by Alison J. Head. Yet another example of something I don’t have time and/or am not in the mood to read right now. But the abstract looks quite interesting:

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.

This seems to fit in with some research that my friend/colleague Bill HD has done on the ways that students multi-task during the research writing process, and the abstract also suggests to me that what students are doing is making audience-based choices. In other words, if the professor will allow the student to “get away” with a lot of internet research, then they’ll use it. If not….